Surface Cyclones in the ERA-40 Dataset (1958–2001). Part I: Novel Identification Method and Global Climatology

Abstract A novel method is introduced to generate climatological frequency distributions of meteorological features from gridded datasets. The method is used here to derive a climatology of extratropical cyclones from sea level pressure (SLP) fields. A simple and classical conception of cyclones is adopted where a cyclone is identified as the finite area that surrounds a local SLP minimum and is enclosed by the outermost closed SLP contour. This cyclone identification procedure can be applied to individual time instants, and climatologies of cyclone frequency, fc, are obtained by simple time averaging. Therefore, unlike most other climatologies, the method is not based on the application of a tracking…